WHOLE HEART | GRAMOPHONE REVIEW

Whole Heart Review

Laurence Vittes

December 2022

Each of the seven works on Claire Bryant’s blazing debut album is about relationships and playing the cello in the 21st century. Jessie Montgomery called her magnificent Duo for violin and cello, written for Adrienne Taylor, an ‘ode to friendship’. The first movement plots slow moving pizzicato chords against arpeggio filigrees, the second is an outpouring of song, the third an exhilarating romp.

Bryant’s ‘best friend’ Adam Schoenberg meant his passionate, deeply conflicted Ayudame, the young cellist’s first commission in 2004, to reflect in part the struggles he had writing the piece; it turns out to be a brilliant virtuoso display with heart. Caroline shaw’s Limestone & Felt, in which producer Nadia Siorta plays the viola, is about relationships subtly at first but ultimately to the extent you lose track of which instrument is playing which musical line.

‘If that is the only moment two people share with each other,’ Reena Esmail writes, ‘it can still be transformative.’ Her Varsha, written as an interlude between two movements of Haydn’s Seven Last Words, uses Hindustani ragas that beckon rain. Tanner Porter’s And Even These Small Wonders was written during the early stages of the pandemic to celebrate ‘the beautiful things about our lives’. Andrea Casarrubio’s SEVEN, commissioned but Thomas Mesa, celebrates the nightly ritual that took place in New York City during the height of Covid when neighbors beat pots and pans for those on the front lines. Jessica Meyer’s Delta Sunrise is a musical sonnet about wanderlust.

The recordings were made at the University of South Carolina. Release-day concerts were scheduled for a maximum security facility and a social club workspace designed by women.